Enduring
by Incarnadine
Summary: Condemned to a life in perpetual darkness, a war hero reflects on the destruction of his life and that of so many others. Death is not the worst fate a man can face, as this man knows only too well.


**_Disclaimer: _**For all the pain, conflict and emotional angst I have foisted upon the characters, they are not mine. They belong to JK Rowling, who I am sure is not planning anything so heartless for any of her characters. The ideas and the raw emotions are mine. There are allusions to slash in this story, but they are so mild that they might as well not be there. But I like them, so they are.

_**Enduring**_

"_It is not miserable to be blind; it is miserable to be incapable of enduring blindness." - _Milton

I'm lucky. That's what they tell me. It depends on what you mean by lucky, really. If you just mean 'not dead', then yes, I am lucky. But there's a lot of ground between not being dead and actually having a life, between existing and being alive. And I survive somewhere between the extremes, halfway between life and death, hope and despair, dusk and dawn. I am trapped in perpetual twilight, a darkness that will stretch and rule my life from this moment on. There is no word I can say, no spell I can cast, nothing I can do that will heal me. Nothing can save me from the sheer agonising blankness of what has become my life.

I know why people think I am lucky. It is because I am not disfigured and crippled like Ginny. It is because I am not unconscious like Hermione. I did not suffer like Theo. I can only shudder to think of what his last moments must have been like. When they found him he was barely recognisable, I heard. His neck snapped in the end. That's what the Death Eaters did to traitors; they ripped them apart. So I am alive, and I still have my wits. I am not insane, not like Harry. But who knows whether or not he is insane? It is a comforting thought for Draco, I suppose; better than thinking that the reason he is so blank and so quiet is that his soul is not there.

So I am not dead. I am not insane. I'm not orphaned, and I'm not heartbroken or suicidally depressed. I'm just blind. Just blind? People who put it like that should be made to try it. But they cannot and will not ever really understand. Wearing a blindfold for a day, or a week, or a month can _never_ show a person what blindness is. Because a sighted person in a blindfold, or with bandaged eyes, still _knows_ that they will see again. All they need to do is remove the restraint, and the light will come in again. I, however, have no such release. Blindness is hopelessness. I will never see again. My eyes are intact, but I did not see with my eyes. The little part of my brain that gave me sight is destroyed, and it can never be repaired.

Ginny visited me the other day. I think she was _glad_ that I couldn't see her. I'd heard all about the horrifying extent of her injuries. Everyone else just stares, she told me. They look at the scars and they can't see anything else. I couldn't see her or her scars. In my mind I saw her as she was before all of this happened, before our young lives were ruined and our world torn. She was a pretty girl, but she scared me. She was just too alive. She glowed with a sort of animal vitality that I could never quite feel comfortable with. But it cut me to the bone to talk to her and know that she was no longer like that. Her affliction has changed her forever. She will never be too loud or too cheerful again.

She asked me how I was coping. It was a front for the question she _really _wanted to ask. The question everyone wants to ask when faced with a blind man, but never dares to articulate. _What is it like to be blind?_ And it's a question that I don't know how to answer. It's like nothing. It's impossible to explain blindness to the sighted. Impossible to put into words the feeling of desperation that sometimes descends on me. How disheartening it is to have to clutch at the furniture to move about the house. How frustrating it is to put something down only to be unable to find it again, simply because you just _can't see it_.

If I'd felt more comfortable with her, maybe I would have given her a proper answer. But my shields, long established from a life of being isolated and alone, went up against her, as unfair as it might seem. Fighting side by side hadn't made us friends. So I simply gave her one of my quiet, reassuring answers that I save to soothe the people who worry that I'm going to burden them with my grievances. I have no one to whom I would give a proper answer to that question. Theo was the closest I ever had to a friend. Since his death I have had no one to confide in.

The closest I came to confiding in anyone was, surprisingly, with Draco Malfoy. He only came round here once. Maybe once was enough. Maybe talking to me touched too many raw wounds, and he could not bear the thought of doing it again. I understand him. I do not like my own company at the moment. I am far too maudlin a character now to provide any attractions to anyone, even a desperately distraught man like Malfoy; a man forced to watch his lover existing mindlessly, neither recognising him nor saying a word. I suppose Harry is better company for him than I am. At least Harry doesn't say things he doesn't want to hear, or ask questions that he doesn't know the answers to.

I was curious, in much the same way as Ginny was curious, so I asked him what it was like, living without Harry. I asked him what he missed the most. I had hurt him; I could hear that in his silence. Strangely, I felt no remorse. I was bitter, and I had always hated Draco Malfoy anyway. The fact that he had taken the trouble to see me made no difference. Draco was _whole_. He could see. He was practically unmarked. The only thing he had lost was replaceable; however much he tried to pretend, we both knew that Harry would be forgotten, one day in the not-so-distant future. And when that happened, Malfoy would live again, a luxury not afforded to me.

So I asked him what he missed the most. And he sat there, blankly, and I tried to imagine the look on his face, and found that I could hardly remember what he looked like. And then he asked me, with ice in his voice, what I missed most about my sight. I couldn't answer. I wanted to shout that it was not the same. But I knew that it was. I knew that for Draco losing the only person who had ever seen him as a human being was comparable with losing one of his senses. If it was not for Harry, Draco might not be human. He might not even be alive.

I didn't know what to answer. What did I miss most? What _do_ I miss most? Everything. I miss little things the most. The colours floating across my vision after looking for too long at a bright light. Staring at the clouds and trying to decide if they looked more like a dragon or a broomstick. Closing my eyes against the sun only to find that my eyelids glowed orange, that there was no escape from the light. Taking everything out of my bag and rummaging in every last corner to try and find my reading glasses. I don't need the reading glasses anymore. They are useless to me now.

In the end, I told Draco all of these things. He sat there, silently, for a moment, and I wished that I could see what the emotion on his face was. Then he said, "Then you understand how I feel. Looking at what is left of Harry is as painful for me as picking up your reading glasses is for you. It taunts me. Knowing that he's there, but that _he_ isn't there; the thing that made him _Harry_ just doesn't exist any more. And if it does, it's well buried. It's useless, Blaise. Being alive seems so pointless now." I wanted to scream at him that if he thought his life was pointless, he should try living without his eyes. I wanted to, but I did not. I couldn't. Inflicting pain was always his forte, not mine.

I am selfish. I know that I am selfish, and somehow, it comforts me. It links the man I am now to the boy I used to be. Sometimes I think it's the only link I have between my past and my future. I think about myself far too much, but at the moment, what else is there for me to do? True, I have a steadily growing Braille library, so I can spend hours sitting on a sofa running my hands over the stiff pages, reading avidly. But I cannot read all the time, and people do not come to take my mind off my plight.

No one comes here anymore. The people who fought are slowly being forgotten. We are emblems of a time that no one wants to remember now. I think I would rather have my blinded face on posters, rather have a crowd of irritating, intruding sycophants following me around and disturbing my peace, than this enforced, tragic loneliness. I imagine if Harry was in any state to receive visitors, they would mob him. But not me. I am not the sort of person they want to see. No one wants to think that they might owe their safety to me; that I might have been blinded so that they could continue their little lives unhindered. It makes them too uncomfortable.

The only people who have visited me are people I don't want to – hah! – see. I still say that. Old habits die hard. 'I'll see you later'; 'I must see him sometime'; 'seeing is believing' – does anyone ever stop to think how much our language depends on assuming sight? But the only people who have come to see me have been Draco, and now Ginny. They did not cheer me up. They too avoided the subject of the war, as if it would be tasteless to bring it up. We all lost too much. We lost our _childhoods_, and now we are not even permitted, by our own decency and good taste, to talk about what was and what could have been.

So we did not talk about the war. I don't think that she could have spoken about the conflict even if she had wanted to. I'm not sure that, if she had brought it up, I wouldn't have changed the subject as quickly as possible. But we cannot allow ourselves to forget. In forgetting, we open the path for the same thing to happen again. I would not wish my fate, or Ginny's, or Harry's, or even Draco's, on another innocent human being. This is not life; none of us are truly alive. Perhaps the Dark Lord has won after all. But then, in war, there can be no winner.

The warmth on my face is dying, so I know that it is evening. The light outside is fading, and the sunset will be beautiful and majestic, but I will not see it. It is dark to me all the time. Dark as night, or darker. Even at night, there are illuminations of hope, the stars, but I cannot see them any more. I used to lie on my back in the grass and stare up at the night sky, remembering my father's old stories about the constellations. Yet another thing closed to me; my darkness is absolute, no silver among the black, nothing more and nothing less than absence of light.


End file.
